This Is How Abraham Lincoln Played Politics. And It Won Him Re-Election.

Harold Holzer is author of the new book, “Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion,” from Simon & Schuster, from which this column is drawn.

A
century and a half ago this month, Abraham Lincoln seemed safely
headed to victory in his once-hopeless wartime quest for a second
term in the White House. Public opinion polling had yet to be
invented, but all available signs pointed by October 1864 to a
Lincoln win. That is to say, the three most powerful newspapers of
the day—the New York Times, New York Tribune, and New
York Herald (their influence spread exponentially by their widely
circulated national editions)—finally seemed united behind Lincoln,
or at least resigned to his re-election. Their sudden, nearly
unanimous enthusiasm must have seemed no less astounding to voters of
the day than it would be now if a modern candidate won unanimous
hosannas from CNN, Fox, and MSNBC alike.

How a campaign that
Lincoln himself had once believed he would lose generated so much
crucial support from influential editors at the eleventh hour is a
story that turns a spotlight on the highly partisan press of the
Civil War era. Newspapers not only covered news in the age of
Lincoln, but openly took sides—or took part—in politics. The
year 1864 saw the apogee of this interconnected, no-holds-barred, and
sometimes disreputable culture, and one wonders whether even this
year’s savviest candidates for the Senate could have navigated so
perilous a press environment.

The
1864 contest has accurately been called the most important
presidential election in history. Had Lincoln lost, his Democratic
successor, George B. McClellan, would have cancelled the Emancipation
Proclamation. Instead Lincoln rebounded. His comeback began not
only with General William T. Sherman’s morale-boosting September 1
capture of Atlanta, but because of the president’s relentless
ability to overcome the pessimism and outright hostility of
antagonistic or fretful press titans in the days before Sherman’s
triumph.

When
election season began, the “big three” New York editors exercised
enormous influence. The Tribune’s pro-Republican Horace
Greeley—who in late August morosely described the Union as a
“bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country longing for peace”—was
an admired though eccentric antislavery champion. The Herald’s
independent, conservative James Gordon Bennett was a recklessly
sensationalistic but enormously popular chronicler of national life.
And the Times’ Henry Raymond was a dependable Republican
stalwart and moderate voice for Union and emancipation.

All three
journalistic giants were much more than editors. All had long and
openly immersed themselves in politics, too—not only influencing
voters, but occasionally seeking votes as well. Neither the public
nor the press perceived any conflict in their double lives. Without
recusing himself from his editor’s chair, for example, Greeley had
once served briefly in Congress (where he took little notice of his
House colleague from Illinois, young Abraham Lincoln). The Tribune
editor had lusted for elective office ever since, questing for
lieutenant governor, governor, and the U. S. Senate—and losing
every race.

Raymond,
by contrast, had been Speaker of the New York State Assembly before
founding the Times, and lieutenant governor after. While
serving as an on-the-scene reporter, Raymond had dazzled the very
first Republican National Convention with an acclaimed keynote
speech—functioning as a sort of Mario Cuomo and Chris Cuomo rolled
into one. During the 1864 presidential election year the
inexhaustible editor became a candidate for Congress from Manhattan
while concurrently managing the paper—and in the bargain
chairing the Republican National Committee (no unique conflict there:
the co-owner of the anti-war New York World chaired the
Democratic Party). During his spare time, Raymond managed to author
a flattering 492-page Lincoln campaign biography. In return for
their (not always consistent) support of the Lincoln administration
over the past three years, both Greeley and Raymond had expected—and
routinely received—federal patronage jobs for their friends.

Bennett was a
different sort, unaligned with organized politics since the
Jacksonian era, and gleefully critical of most politicians since,
including Lincoln, whom the racist editor had recently assailed for
making soldiers of African Americans. Bennett proved so hostile to
black freedom that his local newspaper rivals (with whom he had been
battling for market preeminence for more than a decade) held him
responsible for stirring enough resentment to military conscription
to ignite the deadly 1863 New York draft riots. For years, Lincoln’s
allies had advised him that all Bennett really wanted was social
recognition: “to be invited with his wife and son to dinner or tea
at the white house.” Even in 1864, Lincoln resisted making
“respectable” a man many Americans regarded at best as a
vulgarian and at worst a Southern sympathizer.

Ironically, when
Lincoln let it be known he desired a second term, it was Republican
Greeley who proved the most dubious and duplicitous of the big three.
He not only backed the third party candidacy of failed Union General
John C. Frémont, but concurrently encouraged Lincoln’s own,
incurably ambitious Treasury Secretary, Salmon P. Chase, to challenge
his boss for the Republican nomination. “If in 1864 I could make
a President (not merely a candidate),” Greeley enticed him, “you
would be my first choice.” When the Chase boom collapsed, the
editor tried to lure Generals Sherman, Ulysses S. Grant, and even
William Rosecrans into the race, but all three declined to challenge
their commander-in-chief. Even with the president’s re-nomination
a foregone conclusion, Greeley editorialized on the eve of the June
convention: “Mr. Lincoln is already beaten. He cannot be elected.
And we must have another ticket to save us from utter overthrow.”

Greeley was not yet
done undermining the president. Two years earlier he had lobbied
Lincoln to hasten emancipation, but now, astonishingly, he began
negotiating his own armistice with the Confederacy, placing black
freedom on the negotiating table. Amidst much publicity, the editor
journeyed to Niagara Falls to engage self-appointed Rebel emissaries
on peace. But at the last minute, Lincoln ingeniously saddled him
with instructions that made clear that armistice would be considered
only if it embraced both “restoration of the Union and abandonment
of slavery.” That proved a non-starter for Rebels determined to
leave Niagara Falls with recognition of both their independence and
their human property. The talks collapsed—as the canny Lincoln
sensed they would.

Sherman’s
victory at Atlanta a few weeks later took much of the steam out of
George McClellan’s Democratic challenge. Yet later that same
month, the incorrigible Greeley sent letters to the nation’s
Republican governors urging them to call a new party convention to
dump the president and replace him with another candidate. Only when
this last-gasp effort failed did the editor perform yet another
acrobatic flip-flop. Once Frémont withdrew from the race on
September 17, Greeley’s efforts to re-elect a president he had
tried so hard to sabotage included an effort to ban Democratic
newspapers from the camps of Union soldiers who would soon be casting
absentee presidential ballots. For once unforgiving, Lincoln
dismissed the editor as “an old shoe—good for nothing now,
whatever he has been.” He never saw Greeley again.

Although the
President’s tough stance had burst Greeley’s Niagara Falls peace
bubble, Lincoln’s defense of emancipation ended any delusion that
restoration of the Union remained his sole war goal. This renewed
spotlight on black freedom had in turn alarmed the Times’s
Henry Raymond. On August 22, the party chairman sent Lincoln a
despairing letter predicting a “rising tide” against the
Republicans and warning that the president could not possibly win a
second term unless he initiated peace negotiations of his own and
offered to postpone emancipation after all. Exasperated, Lincoln
summoned the entire national committee to the White House, where he
worked his magic on Raymond, convincing him it would be better to
lose than renounce the Administration’s greatest accomplishment.

“Cheered”
by the pep talk, Raymond went back to work in Lincoln’s behalf with
a vengeance. When his reinvigorated efforts included demanding that
Brooklyn Navy Yard workers donate to the Lincoln campaign or forfeit
their jobs to people who would, an infuriated Navy Secretary Gideon
Welles demanded that Lincoln overrule a scheme he ascribed to the
“vicious school of New York politics.” Not surprisingly, the
president sided with the New York “school,” campaign
donations—and Henry Raymond.

Bennett proved the
toughest to harness, and for a time, his editorial attacks the
ugliest. Eventually, Lincoln secretly dispatched journalist William
Bartlett to the Herald in an attempt to defang its explosive
editor (though similar negotiations had failed four years earlier).
The President’s wife, Mary, journeyed to New York to flatter
Bennett—whom she genuinely liked—in person. Rebuffed, the
administration countered with its only real “peace” proposal of
the campaign: the offer of a plum diplomatic post for Bennett in
return for his support, nothing short of a criminal act in today’s
regulated political world.

Although
some historians have maintained that the Herald thereafter
formally backed Lincoln’s candidacy, this is not true. Indeed, the
paper continued to criticize the president. Perhaps an outright
endorsement would have seemed too obvious and craven, even for
Bennett. Instead, the Herald simply intensified its criticism
of Democrat McClellan. In one of his final comments on the election,
Bennett groused: “We have no hope of Paradise regained with this
election…. The choice, Old Abe or Little Mac, is rather a choice
of evils than a choice of excellences.” But when a desperate
Confederate president Jefferson Davis proposed offering southern
slaves their freedom in return for military service in his depleted
army, Bennett graciously admitted in print: “When such propositions
come from Richmond, the negro soldier policy pursued by President
Lincoln ceases to be a debatable question. He is vindicated by the
Rebels themselves.”

On November 5, with
editorial praise from the Tribune and Times
reverberating nationwide, and the Herald’s universal sound
and fury signifying little, the president won a landslide victory.

Lincoln
lived up to his side of the secret bargain with the devil that had
helped put him over the top. Although the guileless Gideon Welles
had heard rumors of a post-election reward for the still-critical
Bennett and confidently dismissed them, Lincoln indeed offered the
controversial editor the prized post of Minister to France—perhaps
consoling himself that banishing his old enemy overseas would at
least permit reconstruction to begin without the Herald’santicipated scorn. But Bennett grandly declined, insisting he
was too old to assume “the labors and responsibilities of so
important a position.” Perhaps all he ever wanted was to be asked,
as Lincoln perceptively understood.

Gideon Welles
should have known better than to doubt that Lincoln would pay his
debt to Bennett, just as he had granted extraordinary influence to
Greeley and Raymond in order to maintain their loyalty and
enthusiasm. After all, before entering politics, Welles had been an
editor himself. And there had been no separation between journalism
and politics during Welles’ time in the newspaper business, and for
the next four roiling decades as well. Never was this more so than
in 1864, the year New York’s big three editors nearly defeated, but
in the end helped re-elect, Abraham Lincoln in the most important
presidential race in American history.